Luke Eplin answered a phone call two years ago. He didn’t recognize Indiana’s number, but the voice on the other end of the line was unmistakable.
“Luke,” the man said, “this is Coach Knight.”
His voice had faded, but the intimidating tenor of Bobby Knight, the former basketball coach, was still there.
Eplin had sent Knight a copy of his book, “Our Team,” after learning he was a big fan of the Cleveland baseball team, now called the Guardians. So she tracked down Knight’s address, sent him a copy of the book, and included his contact information.
Eplin, who grew up in a household with strong ties to the University of Illinois, a sworn enemy of Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers, was surprised to hear from Knight. He was also slightly worried about how the conversation would go: Knight sounded weak, but he was known as a chair-throwing, unrepentant, volcanic personality on the basketball court.
Instead, Knight wanted to talk about the book, which details the journey of four figures who helped Cleveland become the first American League team to integrate black players in 1947. Knight, who grew up in nearby Orville, Ohio, he was then about 7 years old.
But Eplin thought Knight sounded confused.
“You could tell there was fog, I wasn’t connecting,” Eplin said. “I didn’t know what to do with it. I just found that he seemed a little distracted and out of it.”
A week later, Eplin would learn that Knight had Alzheimer’s disease. Bob Hammel, a friend of Knight’s, called Eplin to inform him that Knight had lost almost all of his memory, including the decades he spent coaching basketball. But one memory remained: that of the Cleveland baseball team in his youth.
Hammel had read the book aloud to Knight, who would prevent him from talking about specific players or games. The book brought them both comfort, Hammel said.
Eplin had held that story for two years until this week, when Knight died at age 83. he shared the exchanges on X.
Knight was known as a brilliant coach but one of the most polarizing characters in sports when he led the Hoosiers from 1971 to 2000, winning three national championships and 11 Big Ten titles. He swore and swore and was convicted of assault. His bombastic approach was ultimately his downfall. He was fired from Indiana after choking a player during practice and getting into a fight with another student.
Eplin grappled with how to reconcile the persona he grew up with and the shell of a man clinging to childhood memories. Perhaps, he thought, “we can hold both of these ideas together.”
“He had a complicated legacy that we shouldn’t dismiss,” Eplin said. “My story does nothing to erase that. But he also had these moments of humanity and had friends that he interacted with.”
Many of those moments came in the form of baseball.
Hammel, 87, a longtime friend, journalist and co-author of Knight’s autobiography, said Knight grew up a Cleveland fan. His mother used to walk around the house with a portable radio held to her ear listening to Jimmy Dudley call the games.
Just a year ago, Hammel said, Knight could recite Cleveland’s entire starting lineup from 1948, the last time the franchise won a World Series. Hammel said Knight began losing his memory when he stopped coaching at Texas Tech, where he led the men’s basketball team from 2001 to 2008.
But baseball was steady, and his coaching approach—a combination of ferocious intensity and adherence to academic standards—was admired by many on his team, including George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ longtime owner. Sparky Anderson, the former manager of the Cincinnati Reds. and Tony La Russa, who managed the Oakland Athletics, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago White Sox.
In 1988, La Russa received an unexpected call from Knight. La Russa, who coached the A’s, used a quote from Knight as a way to encourage his players. Knight was concerned that La Russa had misquoted him, so La Russa invited him to spring training that year.
Knight would go on to visit every one of La Russa’s spring trainings through 2011, earning newfound loyalty to whichever team he was coaching.
La Russa’s players looked forward to Knight’s visits, La Russa said. the basketball coach forges relationships through his own brand of backseat coaching. La Russa even let Knight write the starting lineup for an A’s spring training game.
La Russa said Knight’s love of basketball and baseball made sense.
“A lot of what he saw in basketball and baseball was the attention to detail and the fine edge of skilled, elite execution,” La Russa said.
La Russa acknowledged that his friend “wasn’t perfect.”
“It had a short fuse,” he said. “But more often you saw the fun, the wit, the respect. You were lucky to be his friend.”
